In the last issue of Speech Tech Magazine I had an article about natural language systems (NLS) that served as an overview of the technology. Shortly after the issue went live on the web, we got a blog response from Philip Hunter, the vice president of the Voice Interaction Group at SpeechCycle. I interviewed and quoted him throughout the piece. While praising the story overall, he took exception to a few points, making clarifications, etc.

He, for instance, felt I mischaracterized his views when I paraphrased him as having said, “that callers shouldn’t be exposed to a hierarchy of more than five categories.”

Hunter writes, “I didn’t actually assert “that callers shouldn’t be exposed to a hierarchy of more than five categories.” I do think menus structured like that can be problematic and are frequently done poorly, but research (Hura & McKienzie) and deployments (McKienzie, Levine) have shown that the right combination of wording and delivery can allow menus to be fairly lengthy and still be effective. I agree with those findings.”

For the record, the direct quote from our interview was, “The maximum I’d be comfortable with is maybe two menus of four of five things. So that really is going to cut down on the number of things that you can expose to callers.”

In the interest of keeping discussion dialectic, I thought I’d post his response and give our readers a chance to look it over–especially given Philip’s expertise. He has a lot of salient things to say about natural language design in post, as he did in our interview.

Really, getting a conversation started about natural language was the whole point. The article’s final thoughts, that good natural language design is made harder by pervasive more cheaply and poorly designed speech-enabled IVRs, drives the need for a wider discussion home, I think. IVR domains are tied to each other by the quality of overall user experience. When a caller enters a system, they have no idea of what’s driving the underlying technology. It all looks the same.Given the nature of that beast, anything that can be done to improve IVR quality overall will go a long way to winning over caller confidence, and that’s gotta begin with dialogue (no pun intended).

So, in case you missed it upstairs, here’s Mr. Hunter’s post again!

We’d, of course, love to get your comments here and get a conversation going. Really, me and my brother Adam B. appreciate any response we get. Sometimes it feels like we’re slaving in sensory deprivation tank. So if there’s anything any of you Speech Heads out in Speechlandia would like to add, feel free to drop us a line any time.